Tag: clinical trials
Chinese BioMedical Research: Sturgeon’s Law In Action
A Chinese government investigation has found that 80%, yes eighty percent, of Chinese biomedical research is fabricated. I bet that is an underestimate for Traditional Chinese Pseudo-Medicine.
Peanut Allergy Prevention Advice Does a 180
New guidelines suggest that preventing peanut allergies may be as simple as giving peanut-containing food, beginning in infancy. How did old guidelines, which recommended avoidance, get it so wrong?
R&D and the High Cost of Drugs
Until a year ago very few people had ever heard of Martin Shkreli. In 2015 the then-32-year-old CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals LLC became the poster boy for Big Pharma eXXXcesses when Turing acquired rights to Daraprim, an antiparasitic drug used widely to treat toxoplasmosis. The acquisition itself wasn’t particularly controversial. Raising the price of Daraprim from $13.50 per pill to $750 per...
The stem cell hard sell, Stemedica edition
Stemedica Cell Technologies, a San Diego company that markets stem cell treatments for all manner of ailments, likes to represent itself as very much science-based. There are very good reasons to question that characterization, based on the histories of the people who run the company, as well as the company's behavior.
The Cancer Moonshot: Hype versus reality
The Cancer Moonshot has been promoted as a strategy to break the logjam that seems to be holding up new, much more effective treatments for cancer. The key word is "seems," because in reality the Cancer Moonshot is more hype than promise.
On the pointlessness of acupuncture in the emergency room…or anywhere else
As incredible as it seems, advocates of "integrative medicine" are on the verge of creating a new specialty, emergency acupuncture. I wish I were joking, but I'm not.
Whither the randomized controlled clinical trial?
With the rise of precision medicine and genomics, the conventional randomized clinical trial appears more and more outdated. Fortunately, clinical trials are evolving, but will it be enough to incorporate the numerous advances in "-omic" medicine in a rigorous scientific manner to benefit patients?
False balance about Stanislaw Burzynski and his disproven cancer therapy, courtesy of STAT News
One common theme that has been revisited time and time again on this blog since its very founding is the problem of how science and medicine are reported. For example, back when I first started blogging, years before I joined Science-Based Medicine in 2008, one thing that used to drive me absolutely nuts was the tendency of the press to include in...
Tai Chi versus physical therapy for osteoarthritis of the knee: How CAM “rebranding” works
“Complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), now more frequently referred to as “integrative medicine” by its proponents, consists of a hodge-podge of largely unrelated treatments that range from seemingly reasonable (e.g., diet and exercise) to pure quackery (e.g., acupuncture, reiki and other “energy medicine”) that CAM proponents are trying furiously to “integrate” as coequals into science-based medicine. They do this because they have...
Chronic Lyme Disease – Another Negative Study
While Lyme disease itself is a real and often serious infectious illness, the existence and proper treatment of so-called chronic Lyme disease is dubious, and some would say controversial. However, like many controversies we cover, the science itself is not very controversial, but the topic is made so by a persistent minority of outliers who refuse to accept the scientific consensus. The...